Interesting week for PR blogs…

So it’s Friday, busy week in more ways than one, so what to write about? Any interesting news about? Some.

The intersection of tools such as blogs, RSS and podcasting, which foster conversation and communication, with Public Relations, which is all about helping people and organizations to communicate, continues to take place at a rapid pace. (I’m not even a professional poet)

So what best illustrates this intersection? What happened this week that really shows PR people taking blogging seriously? Maybe not what you think – but we’ll get to that later.

Step Forward, Harold Burson. A statesmen of the public relations world, who this week is celebrating eighty five years on the planet and managed to find time to kick off a blog. Fantastic. Now before you all start shouting, I realizing that one entry does not a blog make, but hats off in any case. At the very least it’s great marketing from the folks at BM and deserves more air play than it’s getting.

So on to the second most interesting PR-blogging related story of the week. If you’ve read one single blog this week, you’ll already know that Edelman had acquired A-list uber-blogger, Steve Rubel. This acquisition followed hiring PR blog pioneer Phil Gomes as well as Guillaume du Gardier in France. It’s a bold (and possibly expensive) move for Edelman and along with Richard’s own blog it clearly sends out a message that Edelman, problably more than any other agency, are serious about embracing the world of online communication. Kudos to them.

I used the word ‘acquisition’ in the previous paragraph for a reason. Steve has done an amazing job building his blog from zero to one of the top one hundred blogs in the world. He’s done it through a lot of hard work and it’s great to see someone’s hard work paying off. But of course Edelman didn’t just hire Steve, they negotiated the purchase of Steve’s blog Micro Persuasion from his former employers CooperKatz, illustrating just what a good job Steve has done building his online brand. So hearty congratualtions to both Edelman and Steve.

Postscript

Of course there is a personal downside to this announcement. Steve kindly referenced me in his announcement. So I guess I now know how the marketing folks at WordStar felt when WordPerfect kicked their butts :-).